“MAGAnomics is inflation-feeding welfare for the rich,” says White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates. The economic message is simple, and it echoes the administration’s messaging on such issues as reproductive rights, divisiveness, heath care and more: it would all be worse under a Trump presidency.
Don’t like Bidenomics? MAGAnomics would be far worse, Biden’s team counters, shaming the top-heavy tax breaks Trump delivered and has promised again.
Recognizing that inflation is going to be sticking around through the election, the Biden team is trying to tackle it two ways. One: amplifying the narrative that corporations have taken advantage of inflationary times to raise prices and stoke profits on the backs of working class Americans. Two: Denigrating Trump’s plan to give another giant tax break to those same corporations and wealthy individuals that would, Democrats claim, throw American crude on inflation’s flame.
Pushing MAGAnomics as an economy killer isn’t a new strategy — Anita Dunn, Senior Advisor to the President, published a Bidenomics vs. MAGAnomics release in the fall of 2023, hoping to inform the budget debates.
Inflation is still to high, but we’ve made important progress bringing it down.
Inflation would’ve been the same as last year if we had adopted the MAGAnomics 10% tariff. https://t.co/4xvnZXvoCa pic.twitter.com/ws9xUcvVz1
— Brendan Duke (@Brendan_Duke) April 13, 2024
But the Biden-Harris campaign is now wielding MAGAnomics to aim at inflation, which is — along with the Southern border — the biggest obstacle in Biden’s drive to re-election. Last week Biden said that when his administration took over from his predecessor “inflation was skyrocketing.”
[NOTE: Biden’s term has seen inflation grow to near 9% before falling last month to 3.5%. Inflation wasn’t as high when Trump was in office, but some economists blame the soaring inflation of Biden’s early term on some of Trump’s pandemic-era moves, including stimulus, which Biden’s administration also provided. As usual, each side blames the other.]
With inflation down from its peaks, but refusing to disappear, Biden now says: “We have a plan to deal with it, whereas the opposition, my opposition, talks about two things. They just want to cut taxes for the wealthy and raise taxes on other people.”
That’s MAGAnomics, as the Biden team views it — trickle-down “malarkey,” as the President might say.
Another interesting point is that much of this is positioning is built for the campaign narratives — because there are so many contributing factors to inflation that any President’s ability to contain it is limited. (Otherwise, obviously, all of them would.)
To prove this point, it’s worth remembering that inflation is up all over the globe — even where MAGAnomics and Bidenomics are not the main drivers. Inflation is lower, in fact, in the U.S. than in many other industrialized countries including Australia, Brazil, Germany, the U.K. and Russia.